This was one of the big mysteries that occupied me a lot during the research phase. How does a shipping container get delivered? And even more importantly, how does it get set in place?

YouTube enlightened me a little bit on this subject. I learned that you can use a crane, but you don’t have to. You can have the container dropped in place by a flatbed tow truck.

Ron, my container vendor, confirmed that the tow truck drop off method is the most common one. And because the container yard was only a couple of miles from our house, I didn’t have to pay too much for delivery.

But I wondered whether the tow truck method would work in my case.

Getting a 35 foot tow truck from the alley into my yard wouldn’t be easy. It required quite a wide gate or opening in the fence. Plus the truck would have to line up in an east-west orientation to set the container in place, and it needed another 40 feet minimum in front of the container to be able to set the container on the ground and pull back out of the yard after the drop.

We did get concrete trucks that are as long as the tow truck into the yard by removing one fence post next to the gate. That gave us just about a wide enough opening. All other dimensions were super tight with little to no wiggle room.

What I needed was the smallest possible tow truck for my container and a really good driver. I was lucky and I got both.

Our driver didn’t blink about getting the truck into the yard. However, he had his doubts about having enough room to drop the container and then pull back out. As you can see in the video, he managed both. But he used a little trick.

First take a look how he managed to perfectly line up the truck with the concrete slab. He literally dropped the container within half an inch of where I needed it. I was impressed.

For the drop off, he didn’t want to extend his tuck bed all the way because of the limited space to pull back out. Instead, he suggested to stop the bed a few feet short and drop the container on two wood blocks.

That did the trick, and I was able to remove the blocks and lower the container onto the slab with the help of a five foot pinch point bar.

Related posts:

• Container concrete slab pour
• Container slab preps
• Container planning
• Container shopping
• Container rational

Calling for the concrete truck always makes me nervous. You must have all your ducks in a row before the truck arrives or you’re asking for trouble. And once the concrete pour starts you are under the gun, because you only get a certain amount of time per cubic yard to unload before you’ll be charged extra. And you only get one shot to get it right.

The pour for the container concrete slab went fairly smoothly. We had a good truck driver who knew what to do and wasn’t afraid to jump in and help.

We filled the form work with concrete and did a first rough raking. I had set aside a straight two by four which we subsequently used to screed an even surface. That was the quick part of the job. Troweling the edges and smoothing out the middle with the bull float took a little longer, but mainly because I was clumsy with the bull float.

Because the weather was unseasonably cool, I had organized two insulation blankets to cover the slab and protect it from the overnight freezing temperatures while it was curing.

Once the concrete was cured, I removed the form work and we were ready to get the container delivered.

Just in case you’re wondering about the two gray pipes that are sticking out near the edge of the slab: One pipe is a conduit for low voltage electrical wiring and the other for high voltage, just in case I decide at a later point that I need either one in the container. But that would require a separate permit from the city first.

Related posts:

• Container slab preps
• Container planning
• Container shopping
• Container rational

To get the container placed where I wanted, I had to move mountains. Maybe not a mountain, but a hill. OK, it was just a pile of topsoil.

It was the topsoil I salvaged from the parkway rain garden installation. And it was sitting right where I had planned to locate the container.

Once that was moved out of the way, I could start excavating for the concrete slab and aggregate base. I dug down until I was on solid subsoil. That ended up being deeper than the required six inches shown on the plans, because I wanted to get past some buried debris that I came across.

With the excavation complete, I proceeded to compact the subsoil. That was a little bit of a bumpy ride due to the undulating terrain. That problem was solved by leveling out the bottom with dense road base aggregate (IL DOT CA6), followed by the specified granular road base (IL DOT CA7). I kept compacting each four inch layer of base during the installation.

While I was installing the last layer of aggregate base, I also installed the form work for the concrete slab. This helped me with getting everything to the right elevation and level.

The top of the concrete slab was to be a few inches above existing grade to keep the container high and dry. Water should flow around the slab but not onto the slab.

Related posts:

• Container planning
• Container shopping
• Container rational

Some purchases are completed on autopilot. But on occasion there are those where you are not even sure where to start.

My attempts to purchase a decommissioned shipping container eventually took me to a local container yard, which made me feel really, really small.

But the road to that container yard was a winding one.

I first poked around the internet. It wasn’t difficult to find websites that offered shipping containers for sale. But they usually were new, pretty new, pretty pricey, or all of the above.

Plus, you usually couldn’t just add a shipping container to your shopping cart and check out. Instead you request a quote and get call backs from brokers. Some of them are “local” (i.e. within a two hour drive from Chicago), but most were not.

That was not my cup of tea. I was looking for hyper local to keep transportation costs down.

I pulled my mind out of the internet and went old school: I asked around my network for recommendations. My friend Mark Wille at Build Small Casitas put me in touch with a local broker, by the name of Ron. And that is how I ended up in that container yard, only a couple of miles from our house, feeling really small.

Ron led me to a stack of containers that were water and wind tight and in my price range. But it was impossible to pick one. If they are stacked two, three, or four tall and a couple of rows deep, you can’t see much of them.

But no worries! Ron had arranged for the container handler to move any unit that looked interesting onto the ground so we could open it up and inspect it. After three or four, I came across the one container I liked.

We discussed and made arrangements for delivery, but more about that in another post. First I had to get the yard prepared for the container placement.

Related posts:

• Container rational

I was running short on storage space. The materials and tools I had on the second floor started to get in my way. And to finish the second floor, I need to get most of that stuff cleared out.

We don’t have a garage, and I am not really interested in building one, at least not at this point. Nor do I have a garden shed, which would be useful to stash things away. The problem with either one is that breaking into them isn’t that difficult. And that is a problem in an urban environment, particularly if we intend to store tools in the shed/garage.

In short, we needed a storage option that was secure.

The solution that came to mind was a decommissioned shipping container (also called intermodal container). They are made of steel and thus a reasonably secure storage option.

Shipping containers measure eight feet in width and eight and a half feet in height. Some containers are nine and a half feet tall. These are referred to as “high-cube”. Most shipping containers you may have seen are either 40 or 45 feet long. That was way too big for our purposes. The shortest standard size is 20 feet, which appeared to be my best bet, even though I was dreaming of a 10 foot long unit. But my initial research showed that 10 footers were custom fabricated and more expensive than a standard 20 foot unit.

The big question was, where does one purchase a 20 foot long decommissioned shipping container?